ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines the heightened scrutiny of low-wage workers, both employed and unemployed, effected through the widespread use of ‘basic skills’ assessments. Employers are increasingly using literacy, numeracy and language skills assessments as the basis of hiring decisions as well as a range of other employment decisions, including promotion, assignment or reassignment, and firing. Assessment is used in ‘workplace basic skills’ programmes, both in the ‘needs assessment’ phase prior to the establishment of programmes and in the post-programmes ‘learning assessment’ phase. In the workplace, the unequal nature of the employment relationship and the requirement for programmes of education or training to have a measurable impact on profitability tend to conflict with the need for the dispassionate and unthreatening assessment required in programmes of fundamental education. This tendency has been magnified in the recent past as performance on literacy, numeracy and language proficiency assessments has been interpreted as a consummate indicator of ‘fitness’ for work. The chapter concludes that the use of ‘basic skills’ assessments represents an area of fundamental conflict between capital and labour and that, in cases where training programmes are designed to remediate basic skills ‘deficiencies’, the quality of the training itself is frequently as problematic as the assessment.
